The effectiveness of blog use on the reading skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language

In this study, the effectiveness of blogs on the reading skills of students learning Turkish as a foreign language. In the light of the principles of blended learning, a blog was created by the researcher and the material was implemented to the students as an out-of-class teaching material. The participants of the study were 24 university students who were learning Turkish as a foreign language and the instructors teaching them. In order to assess the students' level of reading skills, a reading comprehension test, which was prepared according to B2 level reading outcomes, was administered as a pretest before the study. At the end of the study, the reading comprehension test was administered as a posttest to investigate the effect of the blog experiment. Data obtained from the pretest and posttest were analyzed using SPSS 22.0. In the study, a Blog Attitude Scale was administered to determine students' attitudes towards the use blogs, and data obtained were analyzed quantitatively. Also, the relation between attitudes towards the use of blogs and reading proficiency were investigated within the scope of the study as well, and the data obtained from the Blog Attitude Scale and the reading comprehension test were analyzed using SPSS. Another research method used in the study is focus group interviews and they were held with the students and their instructors for the sake of their thoughts, either positive or negative, about blogs. Audio recordings were transcribed first, and the data were analyzed by the researcher using descriptive analysis methods. In this study, which was designed according to the principles of design based research method; newspaper articles were used in order to create the blog content. At the very beginning, the students were asked their routines for following the news and this had a big impact on designing the blog content and implementation process. Throughout the six-week-period study, the reading strategies, which were determined according to B2 level outcomes, were taught and reading activities were prepared and applied accordingly. The results of the study showed that, there is a significant increase in students' reading skills and attitudes towards blogs. It was also revealed that there is a moderate uphill relationship between students' attitudes towards blogs and their reading achievement. In addition, the qualitative data obtained from the focus group interviews were consistent with the quantitative data obtained from reading comprehension tests and blog attitude scale. Key Words: Teaching Turkish to foreigners, Web 2.0 tools, blog, reading skill, out-ofclass interaction, design based research, attitudes.